What if Xbox One is Another Windows 8?

While hard-core gamers are freaking out because Microsoft mentioned the word “TV” about a million times during last week’s Xbox One reveal event but barely touched on games, I think the company’s next console has a much bigger issue. It’s very possible that the Xbox One, by trying to be all things to all people, will simply be yet another Windows 8. And that is not what Microsoft needs right now.

This fear dates back to an April 2012 comment by Apple CEO Tim Cook who, at the time, ridiculed Microsoft for melding the classic desktop Windows OS with a new mobile OS I call Metro. “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those aren’t going to be pleasing to the user,” he said. “The tablet market is going to be huge … I also believe there is a good market for the MacBook Air [Apple’s Ultrabook portable computer] and we continue to innovate in that product. I think it appeals to someone who has different requirements. You wouldn’t want to put these things together.”

Forgetting for a moment Microsoft communications chief Frank Shaw’s excellent comeback—“it’s not a toaster/fridge. It’s a toaster/oven. Those seem pretty popular. Just saying,” he said via Twitter—Cook may have had a point, in retrospect. Windows 8 launched in October 2012 to little acclaim, still has tiny market share for a mainstream Windows release, and users are so in uproar over the confusing UI that Microsoft is changing things in a hastily-conceived Windows 8 update. (Or, as a Microsoft engineer would say, a release that’s been planned for at least two years.)

The problem with Windows 8, I think, can be tied to a single important design decision. Rather than create a separate mobile OS for tablets, Microsoft grafted this new thing (“Metro”) onto the Windows desktop. They did this to ensure success, not because anyone was asking for it: PC makers sell over 300 million copies of Windows a year, so this new hybrid version of Windows would immediately become a major new platform. That was the theory anyway.

What people don’t like about Windows 8 is that it tries to do too much, kind of a, “hey, you got your Metro in my desktop OS!” kind of complaint. Too many people find the hybrid OS confusing and complex. And if you don’t believe that, then please explain why Microsoft is touting Windows 8.1 as an update focused on “customer feedback.” (Actually, please don’t. This is a fact.)

So now we have Xbox One.

Let consider what Microsoft is doing here. Like Xbox 360, Xbox One is a video game console, a honking piece of hardware that you stick under an HDTV. Like the 360, it plays video games. Like the 360, it runs entertainment apps like Netflix and Hulu Plus. Like the 360, it connects to Microsoft services like Bing, Xbox Music and Xbox Video, and like the 360, it can be controlled by devices like Kinect and Xbox SmartGlass-equipped mobile phones and tablets.

So, it sounds an awful lot like the Xbox 360. But there are some key differentiators. These are, in order:

TV. Paradoxically, Microsoft is pushing the notion of controlling a TV signal with the Xbox One in a way that was not possible with the 360. (In the old model, you’d control the TV signal with a Media Center PC and then blast the content over the network to the Media Center Extender app on the 360.)

Performance. The Xbox 360 is a single-minded device, designed to do just one thing at a time. So there are serious performance issues involving switching between apps and games and the Dashboard UI, and no real ability to do more than one thing at a time. This is why Skype was never really a viable experience on the 360, whereas it’s at the center of the Xbox One user experience.

Price. Where the Xbox 360 can be had for as little as $99 with a two-year Xbox Live commitment at $15 a month, and a mainstream version is just $199, the Xbox One is a premium entertainment experience that ships with a Kinect sensor whether you want it or not and will cost $499. There’s no entry level version, and there’s no non-gaming version (though both were planned at one time).

Maybe I’m missing something, but isn’t this weird combination of features—TV! Video games! Online entertainment services! Skype!!—sort of reminiscent of Windows 8? I mean, after all, you’re already paying for cable TV (because if you’re not, this feature doesn’t work with Xbox One anyway). And you can already get a box that works with Netflix, Hulu Plus, and every single other entertainment service on earth there is, and it costs just $99 (or even cheaper). (And unlike the Xbox One, that device is completely silent.)

Given the relatively tiny market of people who actually play video games on consoles—the total actual user base for the Xbox 360 is about 50 million people or fewer, compared to 1.4 billion people using Windows every day—what’s the market for an audience that basically equates to these people plus Netflix and live TV viewers? It’s about 50 million people. No one is spending another $500 to watch Netflix, sorry. Or live TV.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll wait in the pouring rain to buy an Xbox One. But then I’m part of that sad, weird little market noted above. I’m starting to wonder if Microsoft just made a box that was something the engineers in the Xbox team wanted, rather than something that its customers were actually asking for. And to me, that sounds an awful lot like the way Windows 8 was designed.

Discuss this Article 78

Microsoft seems pretty tone-deaf with the XBox One.
Some problems off the top of my head:

Who watches live TV anymore, especially among people who would spend $500 on a set top box? The TV integration features are useless to these people.

Who wouldn't be creeped out by having an always-on video camera in their living room watching and listening to everything?

Let's say you are creeped out by the Kinect - you can't upplug it, and if you unplug the Xbox to turn it off, you will lose the HDMI passthrough and have to rewire your cable box to your TV.

I would probably just plug the Xbox One in as another HDMI source and skip the HDMI-in nonsense, but I have to pay for it anyway.

Skype on the ultrawide Kinect sensor won't be very good unless you move to be right next to the Kinect.

The original Kinect has been a dud for games. Will a new version really be enough to make it worthwhile?

Finally, as Paul mentions, the only people who will buy a $500 set top XBox are video gamers, and Sony is providing a much more appealing product with 50% more gaming horsepower and a lower overall hardware cost.

To me, the argument is philosophical. If something can do multiple things well, it should go ahead and do them. I don't buy the argument that a thing should have one purpose. Some things have one purpose. There's no universal law that dictates this to be universally true or desirable.

Water quenches thirst *and* puts out fires. It's not a design flaw with water.

If the XB1 can provide a great gaming experience and a great living room experience in other ways, that wouldn't be counterintuitive to my sensibilities in any way. At least, not any more than the fact that I play games and listen to music on my phone.

I understand the notion that there are a lot of possibilities on how to improve the way we watch Live TV; Every cable box that I have used has a very clunky UI, and with the hundreds of available channels it is hard to find something worth watching.
I believe that this need is starting to get handled by the Mobile market. Both Samsung and HTC have implemented a TV feature in their new flagship devices - it completely replaces the need to use the cable remote. They have a slick (especially for a 1st gen) interface to show you what's playing, and tunes your cable box with a tap of the screen through the IR port.

How about the idea that people are not going to dump their XBox 360s right off the bat so you have the XBox 360 and the XBox One cluttering up the media center, different controllers (although similar enough that you might have to look to tell the difference), a declining gamers market (no one is going to spend $499 plus $60/year just to use the XBox One as a multimedia box - unless they change the terms of XBox Gold). Since there is no backwards compatibility for either system price is going to be huge for both systems (I don't think the Kinect is a huge selling point (I don't give commands to my phone and I don't expect to wave things around for the kInect) so if Sony is significantly cheaper (say $100) that will be a huge advantage for Sony.

I don't have a problem with the TV integration at this point. I've felt, for a number of years now, that the GUIs for Verizon and Comcast boxes are just really crappy and are in need of serious overhauls. I'll wait to see more.

About the Win 8 interface being confusing, have u ever connected to a Win 2012 Terminal Server using the Metro Remote Desktop client? Pretty handy actually, how the RDP app bar has all the key GUI controls - Start, Switch apps, Snap, App commands, and Charms. It also has a Touch pointer option to toggle between touch navigation and a touch-controlled mouse pointer. If Microsoft actually put this natively into the app bar of the Windows 8 OS, it would go a long way to easing discovery and use of these features...

If anyone thinks that MS is satisfied with the 75 million Xbox 360's sold, you must be delusional. They know that to go mainstream, they have to appeal to more than just gamers and the price point has to come down. Mark my words on my comment from last week, "Something that no one is talking about is the implications of having "3 separate OS's" simultaneously running on the new Xbox One. Rather than having one monolithic OS, having 3 separate allows them to easily rip out the other two, keep the Windows 8 kernel OS, strip down the hardware and voila, they have a low-cost Xbox One lite around the $100 price point to better compete with AppleTV and GoogleTV" and it will come without Kinect 2.0 although you can buy it separately. It will include a remote control. And to top it off, it may stream games from the cloud to give you your gaming fix.

XBOX One will sell but I think not as good as XBOX 360 because Sony got it right with PS4. PS4 is all about gaming and that's what people want for the most part. Microsoft should not force users to pay for any used games, that would be just wrong. Also 500GB is not enough for copying games there. It will get full quickly. I suspect Cloud will be used to store your game saves and I also suspect that people won't be able to use XBOX One unless they have outlook.com account. Just my guess...

I disagree completely. What about society these days makes you think people want uni-use technology? Sony knows better and you can bet your britches that they will integrate any service and feature that they can. They're both going to do almost the exact same things from a gaming perspective and they will mostly have the same games. it's the other things that will set them apart.

Honestly I don't see how they compare. The Windows 8 "tries to do too much" thing doesnt come from it having too many capabilities, it comes from them trying to operate for so many separate input devices (mouse, keyboard, trackpad, touch) - and that turns into a bad experience, especially when you are limited to only one of those inputs (ie. Touch only device has horrible use on desktop, Mouse and keyboard have bad use in metro).
With the Xbox however everyone who purchases one will have the same inputs - Kinect and controller.

I would be okay with paying $499 for the device to use as a gaming/media system, but charging an additional subscription fee just to use media services (like YouTube, IE, Skydrive, Netflix) that are free on every other platform is downright insulting.

I think that looking at the Xbox One as a high end x86/PC based, HDMI mixer that can play games in one of the Virtual Video sources would be more acurate picture (pun intended). The external Cable Box/TV is another Virtual Video sources, selection controlled by the IR.

Come on Debbie Downer.. Remember during the demo when duder was bouncing around through TV and snapping apps with his voice? Remember how your eyes got wide and you felt giddy? We all felt that way.
People will buy it for one cool factor or another and revel in all the extra gravy they get.

I have a feeling, though, that this sort of thing looks a lot better on stage than it does in the living room. Better close the drapes when you start yelling and jerking and waving your hands all around, else a neighbor might see and call 911 thinking you are having a seizure...;)

The One seems to be aimed solely at the North American consumer. I wonder if they even launch it internationally? If they do, it will fail, of course.

MS is repeating the same mistake most American consumer electronics companies do. They either treat the international market the same as the US one, or simply divide the global market into "US and the Rest" (like the WP team have told they do, and Apple does.) This is the reason iPhone, for instance, is dropping in market share like a stone in water; it fails to address the non-US markets (no Siri, no Passbook, no 4G, horrible Maps, prices in the range of 1000 USD for iP5, etc.) Indeed, India is not Texas. Scandinavia is not California. Xbox One will fail for the same reason. Wallmart failed in Europe for the same reason, and so did/are many others. These companies are willing to spends billions in R&D, yet do not bother to hire a single local to tell them how the product relates to the local cultural context. Amazing stuff.

Google here is an expection. They address the US market, and the Brazilian market, and the German market, and the Israeli market, ... you can continue the list till the floor. That is why Google is so incredibly-successful, why they have become ubiquitous. They operate in a very non-American way. The operate much like Nokia did in the 1990s when they took over the world. Unsurprisingly, many of the same people now work at Google...

If the rising Chinese tech giants have the sensitivity to remain humble enough, there is a tremendous opportuntiy for them to exploit this weakness in US tech and go after the Asian and European markets. We are already seeing them establishing local research centres across Europe, approaching governments, universitites and consumers directly, learning, following Google's example. I have yet to see a single such initiative from Apple, for instance. They sit tight in California, because they, of cousre, know best. And who in the Xbox team would need some silly Indian's or beer-gorging Austrian's opinion when the engineers know better anyway how to sell a consumer-oriented expensive product that no-one has true need for, that therefore actually needs to be sold them, unlike, say, a refrigerator.

Gotta question: When do consumers ever ask for something they don't know can be made? Answer: Never, because they didn't know it could be made.

So this idea that I constantly read about that proclaims consumers weren't asking for this is absurd. New things are made because someone or a group of people decided they wanted it and know how to do create it, people either like it or they don't. It's either successful or it flops. That's the way of it. This device is no different.

So everyone out there that is diluting themselves with this notion of getting something because they asked for it is setting themselves up for a whole world of wait.

I'm starting to believe that Microsoft loves bad publicity.
Why let all the rage going crazy when they can just said what it is from the beginning, talking about the used games and the always on stuff.
They need to improve on that why to let all the rumors running like that, with all bad publicity still hitting them with Win8 I don't think is good idea to still keeping that profile.

My 2 cents:
I'll wait to E3 so far not looking good enough for me to buy the One.

Is anyone here concerned about the Privacy aspect? This thing goes way overboard in that regard. It's not enough that they have all our emails, now they can see and hear everything we do in our home with the (required for use???) Kinect. Way creepy. Count me out. I love cutting edge hardware as much as the next guy, but what happens in my home is not for Microsoft to know or very literally be able to record/monitor. This will make them very unpopular once people realise how far it goes. I hope Sony recognizes this and doesn't follow suite. And if they are successful at least that may send a message to MSFT about how to treat customers and their privacy. (Beacause I think with this direction the Xbox One will fail)

Personally I find the One to be much more compelling than the ps4. Both have added features beyond gaming but I will actually use the Ones. Once the kiddies get over all the stupid nonsense like thinking the Kinect will spy on them and find out that Sony will have similar drm issues maybe they will take a more rational look. I do agree that MS still doesn't have PR figured out though.

My understanding is the XB1 requires a set top box from a provider. I got an XB360 to use as an extender so I wouldn't have to pay to rent one from Verizon. So this means that I would have to have another box just to use the XB1? Would I still be able to use it as an extender? I need more storage than 250GB for my recordings.

The difference is MS knows exactly what people are using their 360s for. They don't have to guess whether people use these devices for the media apps, they already know. I gotta say, this post reads like you waded into the video game blogs for the first time ever-- where everyone is an entitled whiner who wants everything for free and is willing to rage at the drop of a hat. But the audiences there also skew young. Video game systems are bigger than that now.

According to this article Microsoft expects to sell 1 billion Xbox One (huh? really?). And they expect the xbox360 to sell close to 100 million in the next 5 years (are they still going to sell the xbox360 for 5 years? double huh?)

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